Consortium

The University of Western Macedonia (UOWM) is actively involved in a broad range of research activities in the fields of computer science including telecommunications systems, computer networking, software engineering, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and distributed systems. UOWM has achieved notable recognition for its research contributions, which have been published in reputable journals and presented at well-regarded conferences and events. UOWM has significant experience in both leading and participating in projects on national, European, and international levels. UOWM coordinates the NANCY project and is responsible for its effective administration and management.

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UBITECH is a leading, highly innovative software house, systems integrator and technology provider, established to provide leading edge intelligent technical solutions and consulting services to businesses, organizations and government in order to allow the efficient and effective secure access and communication with various heterogeneous information resources and services, anytime and anywhere.

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TECNALIA (www.tecnalia.com) is a private, non-for-profit, applied research Centre of international excellence with a strong market orientation aiming at achieving the major impact in economic terms, through innovation and technological development. TECNALIA is the leading private and independent research and technology organization in Spain and one of the largest in Europe, employing around 1,381 people (272 PhDs) and with an income of 117 million € in 2021.

In NANCY project, the group of TECNALIA`s DIGITAL Unit involved is the Cybersecurity and Trust. This group is an international reference team in blockchain that together with our sectoral experts in the fields of energy sectoral experts in the fields of energy, advanced manufacturing, automotive and healthcare form multidisciplinary teams with a holistic with a holistic vision to create solutions from a technological and business perspective.

TECNALIA´s role in NANCY is related with the technology blockchain in 5G and also is the coordinator of the Spain indoor testbed.

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NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies
that benefit businesses and people around the world. By providing a
combination of products and solutions that cross utilize the company’s
experience and global resources, NEC's advanced technologies meet the
complex and ever-changing needs of the company’s customers. NEC brings
more than 100 years of expertise in technological innovation to empower
people, businesses, and society. NEC Europe was founded in 1995 as a
subsidiary of NEC Corporation and holds itself 15 subsidiary organizations all
over Europe, which all build upon NECs heritage and reputation for innovation
and quality by providing its expertise, solutions, and services to a broad range
of customers, from telecom operators to enterprises and the public sector.
NEC Laboratories Europe is a research laboratory established by NEC Europe
Ltd. and is located in Heidelberg, Germany. The lab’s research covers multiple
disciplines, ranging from network technologies, IoT, and security and privacy. In
particular, the security group within the lab has expertise in IoT security,
trusted computing, and blockchain technologies.
NEC leads WP5, and its main involvement within the NANCY project is on the
distributed ledger and contributions to blockchain technologies and smart
contracts.

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The i2CAT Foundation is a CERCA research and innovation centre based in Barcelona.Since 2003, it is committed to designing and building the future digital society by leveraging the knowledge gained from cutting-edge European and local R&D projects in the fields of 5G/6G, IoT, immersive and interactive technologies, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, blockchain, space communications and digital society technologies.

i2CAT wants to lead the challenge of designing the digital society of the future based on research and innovation in advanced digital technologies.

The center promotes mission-driven knowledge to solve business challenges, co-create solutions with a transformative impact, empower citizens through open and participative digital social innovation with territorial capillarity, and promote pioneering and strategic initiatives.

Through talent generation, cooperation, and the commitment of its members, i2CAT envisions Catalonia as a creative, empowered, and innovative society, where knowledge and digital technology are at the service of people.

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Italtel is a multinational ICT group with about 1,500 employees, one third of whom abroad. Our core business focuses on the design, development and deployment of communications networks and on the  provision  of  collaborative solutions created  by  integrating  state-of-the-art  technologies,  which  can  be developed  in  our  labs  or  by  our  ecosystem  of  partners.  The  framework  is  completed  by  the  provision  of innovative services in  infrastructure design  and  engineering,  in  network  automation  and  security,  and  the focus  on  innovative  lines,  such  as Hybrid  Cloud,  Cybersecurity  5G,  UBB,  IoT,  Digital  Workspace, Analytics & Automation.

Italtel has a strong consolidated experience in research and innovation activities, as well as participating in multiple research projects, both at national and European level. As partner of the NANCY project, Italtel coordinates the activities of the WP6 “NANCY System Integration, Validation & Demonstration”.

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Netcompany-Intrasoft is a leading European IT Solutions and Services Group with strong international presence and expertise, offering innovative and added-value solutions of the highest quality to a wide range of international and national public and private organizations. The Company’s Head Offices are located in Luxembourg (2b rue Nicolas Bové, L-1253 Luxembourg).

Netcompany-Intrasoft (previously known as INTRASOFT International) was founded in 1996 by Intracom Holdings and remained a member of it until October 2021. As of November 2021, Netcompany-Intrasoft became a member of the Netcompany Group, a Denmark located IT company founded in 2000. Netcompany is the fastest growing and most successful IT services company in the Nordics, owning vast technology experience and deep industry-specific knowledge, creating innovative solutions tailored to meet business goals.

For more than 20 years, Netcompany-Intrasoft actively contributes to the development of innovative pre-industrial products and services through its participation in EU Research Programmes. We possess a successful track record in managing large and complex collaborative research projects, implementing innovative research prototypes, and effectively communicating research results in Europe and beyond. Serving this mission, the Research and Innovation Development (RID) Department contributes to the strategic policy objective of enabling Europe to master and shape future developments in ICT, and at the same time sustaining the company’s leadership in ICT.Research is conducted by in-house and associate consultants, in conjunction with prestigious Universities and Research Institutions, and acclaimed industrial partners that ensure the articulation of emerging ICT trends into innovative and exploitable research outcomes. As a result, Netcompany-Intrasoft offers an interdisciplinary center of competence on the effects, use and applications of ICT in our targeted markets with a medium to long-term agenda.

The RID Department works in close collaboration with other Netcompany-Intrasoft teams, to bring technological and business innovation within the Group, as part of the overall Netcompany-Intrasoft’s strategy on Innovation. Netcompany-Intrasoft pursues innovation for increasing its business and the value that is provided to its customer base. Netcompany-Intrasoft ensures this by actively participating in relevant to its business and vertical Research & Innovation Projects and, in parallel, by fostering Business Innovation and Intrapreneurship.

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EIGHT BELLS Ltd is an independent high technology company providing innovative solutions, based in Nicosia, Cyprus and Athens, Greece. We specialize in selected parts of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the fields of Defense, Security, Telecommunications, Cybersecurity and eHealth. Our technical capabilities include Systems & Networks Engineering, Cloud Computing and Privacy, Security & Data Protection. Within NANCY, the company will lead the development of a network information framework that quantifies the achievable performance of networks in different environments. Additionally, 8BELLS will explore the means to deliver NANCY outcomes to the B5G market by developing a business plan targeted to SMEs and start-ups, 5G service providers, 5G infrastructure manufacturers and operators, cloud and providers and specialists, and verticals vendors.

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The Thales DIS GBU offers a wide range of secured products, solutions and digital services in:
– Banking & Payment, providing to financial institutions contact and contactless payment cards, supporting their digital transformation with software, services and data encryption for digital banking, payment & ID verification.
– Big Data Analytics, providing the ability and intelligence to manage data and take decisive actions, in real time, giving a tremendous boost to the digital transformation across all industries.
– Enterprise Security, providing data encryption and identity and access management solutions built in the cloud, and for the cloud.
– Government, supporting Government agencies worldwide in civil identity, biometrics and law enforcement, and supplying secure identity documents, ID verification services, digital government as well as border control, public security and criminal forensics.
– IoT, providing solutions for connected industrial and consumer services from smart energy to car infotainment.
– Mobile, providing enhanced connectivity and mobile ID verification solutions to the mobile ecosystem.
– Software Monetization, providing software companies and intelligent device vendors with software licensing, protection and entitlement management solutions.

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Founded in 2000, DRAXIS Environmental S.A. is a dynamic Greek SME headquartered in Thessaloniki (Greece), having branch offices in Brussels (Belgium) and Athens (Greece). DRAXIS focuses on developing real life environmental ICT solutions and providing specialized environmental consultation services. The company uses, combines and integrates remote sensing technologies, compound algorithms, GIS and other datasets to build multi-functional web-based information systems, mobile applications, crowdsourcing platforms, workflow-based digital services and other software solutions mainly in the fields of climate change, air quality, energy and circular economy.

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The Hellenic Telecommunications Organization S.A.  (OTE, https://www.cosmote.gr/) member of the Deutsche Telekom (DT) Group of Companies, is the leading telecommunications (network and services) provider in Greece. OTE together with its subsidiaries, forms one of the leading telecom groups in the southeastern Europe (OTE Group of Companies). OTE offers its customers a wide range of technologically advanced services such as broadband services and ICT solutions in the residential and business market segments, including FTTH/VDSL, 5G/4G+, TV content,  multimedia services, leased lines, maritime and satellite communications. OTE’s vision within the context of the DT Group – as well as of the OTE Group of Companies – is to rank among the largest telecommunications companies in Europe. OTE Group aims at remaining the market leader and pioneer, a modern, high performance, company offering best customer experience based on its technological superiority.

OTE Group invests heavily in New Generation Networks, creating infrastructures which will boost the Greek economy and create growth potential. It is the largest investor in new technologies and infrastructure in Greece, having invested approximately €5bn over the past decade. Furthermore, OTE systematically promotes research and innovation (R&I), with multiple benefits for society, customers and employees. Our R&I activities are contributing directly to our strategic pillars for: technological superiority; innovation & new revenue streams; digitalization, simplification and cost optimisations, and; growth mindset.

OTE’s R&D Department is involved in almost all technological and infrastructural issues, and is an active participant in many EU, national and international collaborative projects. OTE’s current R&D activities include 5G and broadband technologies and services, next generation network architectures, infrastructure development, etc., following to the actual challenges for the development of a fully competitive network infrastructure & a portfolio of innovative services/facilities.

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Virtual Open Systems is an innovative, agile and dynamic SME software company specialized in virtualization, Linux and embedded software for automotive, industrial, IoT edge, IIoT, cloud computing solutions.

The company delivers most efficient architectures products and services for heterogeneous embedded multi-core platforms that increase value to its customers, help them to lower costs, to reduce time to market, while enhancing their value proposition.

Virtual Open Systems is committed to open source virtualization contributions, such as KVM development for ARMv7 and ARMv8, Linux, QEMU, etc. Virtualization extensions in the direction of mixed criticality with Real-time OS, security, accelerators virtualization (including hardware/software FPGA virtualization) are key assets deriving from the company core skills.

In NANCY Virtual Open Systems will provide low-level expertise on the ARMv8 architecture necessary to build the necessary infrastructure for the envisioned software frameworks and middlewares.

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Jozef Stefan Institute (JSI) is the leading research institute in Slovenia and is actively involved in a broad range of research activities and technology transfer in the fields of ICT & electronics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, nanotechnology, environment, and nuclear technology.The field of ICT & electronics includes expertise in telecommunication systems, artificial intelligence, knowledge discovery, embedded systems, and other. It is also the leading Slovenian institution in terms of European projects. As part of the NANCY project, JSI will contribute with its expertise in artificial intelligence such as time series analysis, reinforcement learning, localization, andautomatic spectrum activity detection and classification.

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The Consortium for the Research in Automation and Telecommunication (CRAT) is a no-profit research consortium that was founded in 2006 on the initiative of Prof. Francesco DelliPriscoli and Prof. Roberto Cusani.

The consortium is currently composed by the universities

• University of Rome “La Sapienza”
• Politecnico di Bari
• University of Sannio

and the companies

• Thales Alenia Space Italia
• TopNetwork

CRAT applied research is focused on Telecommunication Systems, focusing on both terrestrial and satellite ones, Computer Systems and Energy Systems.

In addition, CRAT takes part in National and European research projects and carries out applied research on behalf of companies or public and private institutions.

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Ericsson TelecomunicazioniSpA (TEI) is the Italian company in the Ericsson Group (Ericsson). Ericsson is the world’s leading provider of communications technology and services in Telecommunication and Information and Communication Technology. Ericsson is the leader in 2G, 3G, 4G and the coming 5G mobile technologies The world’s 10 largest mobile operators are among Ericsson’s customers and some 40% of the world’s mobile traffic goes through Ericsson networks and Ericsson supports customers’ networks servicing more than 2.5 billion subscribers. It operates in 180 countries and employs about 100,000 people. Founded in 1876, Ericsson is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2022 the company’s net sales were some EUR 22 billion and invested heavily in R&D (EUR 4,0 billion) and actively promotes open standards and systems. It has one of the industry’s most comprehensive intellectual property portfolio containing over 60,000 patents.

Ericsson is a gold member of the OpenStack Foundation with dedicated contributors to many areas and is driving NFV requirements through its platinum membership in the OPNFV Community, a collaborative project in which the carrier and vendor communities are working together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance, and interoperability. Ericsson is also a platinum member of the open-Daylight Project, a collaborative open-source project that aims at accelerating the adoption of software-defined networking (SDN) and to create a solid foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Ericsson is a member of the ETSI Industry Specification Group for Network Functions Virtualization (ETSI ISG NFV), a group charged with developing requirements and architecture for virtualization for various functions within telecoms networks. Ericsson is a member of Open Networking Foundation (ONF) a user-driven organization dedicated to the promotion and adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) through open standards development. Ericsson is member of IETF and attends works into Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), a group responsible for technical management of IETF activities and the Internet standards process. Ericsson launched the world’s first 5G platform making landmark contributions to 5G global standardisation and is currently supporting several business incubators in Europe with the ambition of catalysing Made in Europe solutions. Ericsson offer ranges from voice text and images transmission systems and services, both on fixed networks and on mobile radio systems, the production of electronic components, microwave devices, electronic and defence systems, converged infrastructure based on IP, IP-PBX solutions and multi-channel contact centers, enterprise mobility solutions and specific proposals for several vertical markets such as healthcare, the central and local public administration, utilities, transportation, railways one included and an extensive portfolio of outsourcing managed products.

With 5G standards not yet completely established and commercialized networks started in 2020, Ericsson is already demonstrating fundamental 5G functionality that will be critical to enabling widespread adoption for both consumer and machine-type communications (MTC) with impressive speed test results.

In the Ericsson vision 5G networks will be much more than just radio access: 5G networks will be built in a flexible way so that speed, capacity and coverage can be logically allocated to achieve unprecedented performance and adaptive capabilities to meet the specific demands of each use case.

Yet, enhanced speed and performance, lower latency, and better efficiency also come with risks. Vastly increased numbers of devices and an elevated use of virtualization and the cloud will equate to many more 5G security threats and a broader, multifaceted attack surface. To realize a strong and healthy communications future, the industry needs to maintain a laser focus on 5G security.

Ericsson Telecomunicazioni, which will be engaged in the project with its R&D division, provides system concepts, technology and methodology concerning TLC networks and solutions design related to optical transport systems and photonic devices engineering for 5G mobile networks, cloud and virtualization, NFV, security and data analysis, software ecosystem management, open source adoption business value, component based system development to assure competitive products provisioning, while with its Global Customer Unit TIM interfaces and supports TLC main customers to adopt innovative Ericsson solution. World-class innovation is achieved through cooperation within Ericsson Corporate and with partners, customers, universities and research institutes.

TEI will bring its experience and proven background on telecommunication systems for 3G/4G/5G mobile networks, network security, virtualization and cloud-based technologies, as the world’s leading telecom network equipment vendor and provider of communications products and services.

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BI2S is a start-up company established in Cyprus working on big data, machine learning and predictive analytics in the IoT domain. Bi2S envisions is to support businesses to optimize their operation by introducing intelligence and raising alarms when necessary. Bi2S team mainly consists of experienced engineers with a strong scientific background on algorithms, machine learning, data management and ICT technologies. This allows them to better understand new technologies and innovative techniques and adapt their solutions to several application domains such as agriculture, health, telecomunications, transportation and environment.

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InnoCube is a boutique research and innovation company, designing, developing and implementing novel products, frameworks and tools based on next generation technologies and trends. InnoCube provides state-of-the-art integrated solutions, products, and platforms in the 5G, beyond 5G, and next-generation IoT landscapes. Its ultimate vision is to become the catalyst of positive multidisciplinary changes by capitalizing theoretical research and providing applicable solutions. InnoCube serves as the interface between theoretical and applicable research aiming at providing feasibility studies, high-complexity simulations, and innovative prototypes. Its expertise lies on wireless communications and networks, artificial intelligent, cloud and edge computing. Our team consists of high-experienced researchers and developers with proven organization and managerial skills.

Related expertise / experience:

• Artificial Intelligence: Fully parametrized reinforcement and transfer learning toolbox capable of supporting a large variate of usage scenarios.
• Next-Gen Communications: Design and development of self-organized and self-sustainable orchestrators and slicers capable of supporting internet-of-things (IoT) systems of diverse requirements and radio access technologies.

Cloud & Edge Computing: design, utilize and manage multi-access edge computing with optimized resource allocation and provisioning.

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The Centre for Research and Technology-Hellas (CERTH), founded in 2000, is the only research centre in Northern Greece and one of the largest in the country. The Information Technologies Institute (ITI) of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) was founded in 1998 as a non-profit organisation under the auspices of the General Secretariat of Research and Technology of Greece (GSRT), with its head office located in Thessaloniki, Greece. In particular, CERTH and its group,the Multimodal Data Fusion and Analytics Group (M4D) of the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Lab (MKLab) has significant experience and scientific expertise onArtificial Intelligence (including Machine Learning and Deep Learning),Semantic Technologies and Integration of heterogeneous resources, Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Management,Visual Analytics, Big Data Analytics, Social Media Μonitoring and Social Network Analysis, Web Multimedia Mining, Image and Video Analysis, Multimedia Understanding, Interactive Multimedia Search and Knowledge Retrieval, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Forensics, Computer Vision, as well as Crisis and Security Management.

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SIDROCO aims to make a significant impact in the uprising era of New Generation Internet of Things (NG-IoT), introducing & utilizing state-of-the-art features and capabilities. Designing, implementing and managing novel & resilient solutions on various heterogeneous industrial sectors like Energy, Healthcare and Autonomous Driving, renders SIDROCO to be a valuable research and business partner.

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University of Murcia (UMU) is a public University located in the south of Spain, which has more than 31.931 students, with a teaching and researching staff of about 2,684 spread over 5 university campuses, with 21 Faculties and 5 Affiliated Centres. UMU offers top quality degrees and innovative research (55 Bachelor’s Degrees, 71 Master’s Degrees and 35 PhD Programmes during the academic year 2021/2022).

UMU has designed and implemented trust-based access control systems, secure data sharing mechanisms, as well as privacy-preserving identity management solutions for distributed systems, in scenarios such as IoT. Besides, UMU has deployed diverse security functionalities and orchestration for 5G networks, Also UMU is active on standardization activities with contribution to IETF, ETSI and IEEE.

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The Real-Time Systems Lab of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSS) has considerable experience in research activities related to the NANCYproject, including resource management, real-time elastic/adaptive/energy-aware scheduling, predictability, response-time analysis, and run-time environments (OS, hypervisors, and containerization engines). It is a commonplace for SSSA to release software components in open-source and contribute to existing open-source projects regarding software systems. The SCHED_DEADLINE real-time scheduler constitutes a successful example of this kind, contributed by SSSA into the mainline Linux kernel. SSS has a long-standing tradition in applied research, with a strong commitment to going beyond the classical academic production of papers and publications aimed at producing research outcomes with a real impact on industry and society. This attitude is witnessed by the high number of spin-off companies (more than 45 since 1990), considering the relatively small size of the university, and the high number of industrial collaborations in the context of research projects.
In NANCY, SSS will work on the temporal properties and timing performance in B-RAN modeling (WP2), workload optimization to match timing constraints (WP3), AI-based dynamic resource allocation for software workloads (WP3), online profiling and monitoring with reallocation of computational resources (WP3), timing constraints in offloading policies (WP4), dynamic optimization algorithms for computational resources (WP4), and elastic resource management (WP4).

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Established in May 2021, MetaMind Innovations is the first spin-off of the University of Western Macedonia. Co-founded by Prof. Panagiotis Sarigiannidis, Director of ITHACA Lab, together with PhD students and academic colleagues, MetaMind Innovations leverages its deep tech expertise in Cybersecurity, Artificial intelligence, Big data, and Smart Applications to deliver smart and custom solutions for critical infrastructure and Internet of Things ecosystems. MetaMind Innovations works for industries, public authorities, hospitals, energy production, transmission, and distribution stakeholders, food and animal producers, farmers, and individuals who need state-of-the-art Next Generation Internet of Things solutions.

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DReVen provides advanced product exploitation and disseminates scientific results on state-of-the-art solutions for a wide range of sectors. The company focuses on developing real-life environmental ICT solutions by using, combining and integrating remote sensing technologies, compound algorithms, GIS and other datasets to build multi-functional web-based information systems, mobile applications, crowdsourcing platforms, workflow-based digital services and other software solutions mainly in the fields of climate change, air quality, energy and circular economy.

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UPV/EHU’s participation in NANCY is done through the I2T research group. The group has been working on telematic engineering for more than 25 years, in which they have researched security as a transversal aspect of their other research lines focused on networking and services.  Additionally, three members of the team are part of the UPV/EHU’s Quantum Center. The group is involved in several european, regional and national projects in which they research topic include 5G, QKD and SDN/NFV applied to Industrial communications.

EHU’s main research infrastructure is called Smart Networks for Everything (SmartNets4E, https://i2t.ehu.eus/resources/smartnets4e), a -NFV SDN- and QKD based 5G/6G communication network, which is part of the ESFRI Slices-RI (https://www.slices-ri.eu).

EHU´s role in NANCY is related with the 5G technology and also is the coordinator of the Spain testbed.

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